Is There Any Hope Left for South Sudan?

Soldiers from the Uganda People’s Defense Forces patrol the border with South Sudan after violence erupted in Juba and other towns this week.PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTHONY NAMBWAYA / REUTERS

Last Thursday, I went to an event on Capitol Hill that marked the fifth anniversary of South Sudan’s independence. Young congressional staffers with smart haircuts mingled in a small, bright room, where an exhibit of photographs from South Sudan had been set up for the occasion. There was an open bar. Among those who offered remarks was Congresswoman Lois Capps, of California, who spoke about the troubled country’s prospects for peace. “The sparks are there,” Capps told the room. “Moving from a violent way of being to a sustainable peace—that’s alive.”

As I was listening to Capps, friends in South Sudan were sending me messages via WhatsApp about a gun battle that had just broken out between government and opposition soldiers in the South Sudanese capital of Juba. “ok so latest is that a vehicle pulled up to a checkpoint near munuki roundabout, refused to stop, and two were killed,” one friend wrote. The country was holding its breath—a new civil war seemed possible. At the event in Washington, the new round of violence went unmentioned.

Last Friday, Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, who led opposing sides in South Sudan’s most recent civil war, and who now serve as the country’s President and First Vice-President, respectively, met at the President’s compound to discuss the previous day’s skirmish—but, apparently, while they were talking their bodyguards got into a shootout. After that, the violence in Juba, and around the country, escalated. In the days that followed, two United Nations bases located in Juba were hit with heavy- and small-arms fire, resulting in the deaths of at least two U.N. peacekeepers and eight civilians. The Terrain Camp, a hotel in the city popular among expats, was overrun by gunmen, who killed and raped people inside. According to U.N. officials, civilians around the country were targeted based on their ethnicity—South Sudan’s two largest ethnic groups, the Dinka and the Nuer, have a long history of conflict, which rose to the forefront when the last civil war began, in 2013. The U.N. has reported that hundreds of people were killed in the recent fighting, and that tens of thousands of people have fled their homes. By Wednesday, when the violence ebbed in Juba, it was clear that the peace agreement that Kiir and Machar signed last summer, which was hailed internationally as an important step forward for the country, was not working.

The latest violence is further evidence that South Sudan is a failed state. Kiir and Machar deserve the blame they’ll receive, but it is important to remember that America played a crucial role in the establishment of South Sudan as an independent country. In the early nineteen-nineties, the rebels of southern Sudan became the darlings of a group of Washington activists, and for years afterward they were depicted in the American press as romantic, Christian warriors. The Bush Administration supported their cause, and advocated for South Sudan’s path to independence. By 2005, Sudan agreed to give Southerners a vote on independence, and formal secession occurred in 2011. But, within two years of becoming a country, South Sudan came undone. “The descent into civil war occurred despite hundreds of millions of dollars of aid, hundreds if not thousands of experts provided to the government, and the presence of a U.N. peacekeeping mission,” Ambassador Princeton Lyman, the former State Department special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, said in a speech given earlier this year in Khartoum, Sudan. “It stands as a jarring example of how little influence even such inputs from the international community create when the internal political dynamics work in the opposite direction.” Like Iraq and Afghanistan, South Sudan is a lesson in the limits of American nation-building.

When civil war last broke out, in December, 2013, after years of political gamesmanship between Kiir and Machar, the two sides in the conflict split along a complex tangle of tribal, military, and class lines. By the time the war was declared over, last August, at least fifty thousand people had died, and more than two million people had been displaced. Earlier this year, I visited Leer, Machar’s home town, in a northern district of the country called Unity State. Some two hundred and seventy thousand people lived in Leer before the last war. No one can say how many remained, but when I was there central parts of the city were still empty, and burned-down huts and rusted furniture lined the main thoroughfare.

Last year, the violence in Unity State got so bad that it prompted a renewed international push to force a peace deal between Kiir and Machar. Foreign countries, led by the United States, used both carrots and sticks in negotiating an agreement: they promised to support the country’s transitional government, while also threatening an arms embargo and targetedsanctions against the leaders if a deal couldn’t be worked out. Kiir and Machar signed on only under pressure, and they both quickly acted in ways that undercut the peace. As President, Kiir reorganized the country, increasing the number of states from ten to twenty-eight, a move seen as gerrymandering power into the hands of his allies. Machar, meanwhile, refused to return to South Sudan for eight months after signing the agreement, hampering the government’s ability to operate.

“Salva and Riek do have over-all command responsibility over their troops” a U.N. official, who asked not to be identified, told me on Wednesday, criticizing the excuses being offered by the South Sudanese leadership. “Command responsibility is not a fluid concept. You can’t claim to have it today because they are following your orders and adhere to a ceasefire you imposed, and then say you didn’t have it yesterday because they were fighting.”

In the coming days, the U.N. Security Council is expected to discuss the possibilities of an arms embargo and more peacekeepers for South Sudan. There has already been talk of giving peacekeepers on the ground a more aggressive mandate to protect civilians. Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary General, even suggested sending in attack helicopters. These initiatives might help, some. But Kiir and Machar hold the power—if they want South Sudan to burn, it will.